Nikos Stangos; influential art editor (GREAT OBIT)
Hyfler/Rosner
Nikos Stangos
Art-history editor at Penguin and Thames & Hudson
23 April 2004
Nikos Stangos was one of the most influential figures in
British art publishing. For more than 30 years, as
commissioning editor and director of Thames & Hudson and,
earlier, as editor at Penguin Books, he was responsible for
some of the most important art books of the late 20th
century. As a result, in his modest way, he helped shape the
discipline of art history in Britain and the United States.
With his warmth, humour, intellect and forthright opinions,
he earned not only the respect of all who worked with him,
but also many enduring friendships on both sides of the
Atlantic.
Born in Athens in November 1936, Nicolas Stangos was
descended from both the Byzantine and the classical Greek
worlds. His mother came from an old Constantinopolitan
family, while his father was a member of an old Greek family
that had settled in Sosopol in Bulgaria, the ancient Greek
city of Apollonia on the Black Sea. His parents were forced
to move to Athens in the early 1920s when hundreds of
thousands of Greeks were expelled from Bulgaria and Turkey.
Once there, his father established himself as a successful
architect.
When German forces occupied Greece in the Second World War,
two German pilots were billeted in Stangos's family house.
Among his earliest memories was the sight of the two
officers, who were anti-Nazi, listening with his parents to
the BBC World News on a radio that was strictly forbidden
but which the officers secretly allowed. Before they were
both killed in action, they would often take the young boy
up in their planes for rides.
Stangos's father died of an infection that reached his heart
the day the Germans left Athens in October 1944. At the age
of eight, Stangos became a boarder at the city's American
College, a neoclassical building that had been designed by
his father. He was at the school for eight years, during
which time he developed his vision of poetry and politics.
In his teens, he became a member of the banned Communist
Party, mimeographing propaganda which he then threw from the
balconies of cinemas, courting arrest for his subversive
activities. He soon left the Party, however, when his
poetry, submitted at cell meetings, was criticised harshly
as being too formalistic. Despite this experience, for the
rest of his life he would be a fervent believer in the
socialist duties of the state.
In 1956, Stangos left Greece to continue his undergraduate
studies in the United States, first at the Denison
University in Ohio and then Wesleyan University in
Connecticut, before going on to Harvard University to study
philosophy. After Harvard, he returned to Greece to fulfil
his military duty, before working briefly for Constantinos
Doxiadis, the internationally renowned and innovative town
planner. In 1965, he came to London, having been offered a
position in the press office of the Greek embassy.
Through his friendship with the poet Nanos Valoritis, who
himself had lived in London and had made connections with
British poets, Stangos met Stephen Spender, who would be his
introduction to the cultural world of 1960s London. He and
Spender collaborated with David Hockney on an illustrated
collection of translated poems by the Greek poet Constantine
Cavafy (Fourteen Poems), published in 1967 by Editions
Alecto. At this time, he met, through a mutual friend, the
writer David Plante, and they became lifelong partners.
In 1967, with the military takeover of Greece by right-wing
colonels, Stangos left the embassy, joined demonstrations
against the dictators, and was granted permanent residence
in the United Kingdom. It was at this time that he began his
search for a job in publishing, which had always been his
ambition. He was advised by Charles Monteith of Faber &
Faber to start by working in a bookshop. It did not occur to
him, being as confident as he was, that it would be held
against him that he was not British, that his first language
was Greek, and that he had no experience in publishing,
except for his involvement in Athens as an editor, with
Valoritis, of a literary magazine called Pali.
At a drinks party, however, he was told by an editor at
Penguin Books that there was a position going for an editor
of poetry, art and architecture, theatre and cinema, and
philosophy. He was interviewed by Allen Lane, Penguin's
founder, and was taken on.
It was the start of an extraordinary career in publishing.
As editor of the Penguin Modern Poets series, he was the
first to publish in England the American poets John Ashbery,
Kenneth Koch, Kenward Elmslie and James Schuyler; and as
co-editor, with Al Alvarez, of Penguin Modern European
Poets, he brought the work of the poets Marina Tsvetaeva,
Fernando Pessoa and Yannis Ritsos (the latter translated by
Stangos himself) to the attention of English readers for the
first time.
He also published the writings of diverse poets such as
Spender, Alvarez, Adrian Stokes and Charles Bukowski. At
Penguin, he also began to work with leading writers on art.
With John Fleming and Hugh Honour as outside advisers, he
was responsible for the company's "Style and Civilization"
series, which included Honour's Neoclassicism (1968), Linda
Nochlin's Realism (1971) and Steven Runciman's Byzantine
Style and Civilization (1975).
On the death of Allen Lane in 1970, Stangos saw that, after
its acquisition by Pearson, Penguin Books was likely to
change its character. So in 1974, he moved to Thames &
Hudson, whose position as an independent publishing house,
and its in-built respect for individualism, originality and
high quality matched his own views of what his authors
should expect from their publisher. With the support of the
then chairman Eva Neurath and the present publisher Thomas
Neurath, Stangos became a director of the company, and, as
well as taking responsibility for the entire art-history
list, assumed the editorship of the company's flagship
"World of Art" series, which he held until his retirement in
May 2003.
At Thames & Hudson, he continued to work with leading
artists and art historians, many of whom became lifelong
friends. He was responsible for important books on David
Hockney, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Howard
Hodgkin and R.B. Kitaj, among many others, and commissioned
writers and scholars including David Sylvester, Francis
Haskell, John Golding, Robert Rosenblum, Richard Wollheim
and John Rewald. Aware of emerging trends in art history, he
also worked with younger academics and curators, among them
T.J. Clark, Rosalind Krauss, John Gage, Benjamin Buchloh,
Yve-Alain Bois, Griselda Pollock, Tamar Garb and John
Elderfield.
A number of books under his stewardship won the Mitchell
Prize, one of the highest honours in art history, including
Claude Monet: the colour of time (1992) by Virginia Spate,
Colour and Culture (1993) by John Gage and John Golding's
Paths to the Absolute (2000). He was as passionate about the
very latest in art as he was about art of the past, and he
commissioned some of the groundbreaking books on new media,
installation, performance and video art.
To a young editor like myself, anxious to make a good
impression, Stangos was both a colossus and an inspiration.
A natural mentor and father-figure, he took me under his
wing, always offering encouragement, advice, guidance and,
above all, friendship. It was clear, however, that he was
beginning to plan for his retirement. He started to
introduce me to others as his "son", an honour I did not
deserve but which I happily accepted, and he prepared me for
the realities of publishing.
The acknowledgments that appear in the publications he
commissioned and edited show the high esteem in which others
held him, too, both as an editor and a person. He was
generous and selfless to a fault, rarely taking the credit
he deserved but preferring instead to remain anonymous
behind the scenes. In later life, he was a trustee of the
Elephant Trust, a charitable organisation established to
help fund artistic projects and young artists. Privately he
also supported the activities of a number of galleries,
museums and artists.
All the while, his interest in literature remained vital to
him. For Alan Ross, he guest-edited three Greek issues of
the London Magazine, and he continued to write poetry both
in English and Greek, publishing in Athens two collections
of poems. On his death, he was working on a long poem, to be
called "What is Truth?"
Andrew Brown
It's hard to remember life before, or life without, Nikos
Stangos, writes Robert Rosenblum. I met him first in the
1960s when he was an editor at Penguin Books, launching a
new paperback series on contemporary artists. He found a
perfect match for me, Frank Stella, and that was the
beginning of the many author-editor dialogues we had for the
remainder of the century.
But, in Nikos's case, publishing houses quickly became
domestic spaces; and soon, there was little difference
between the Nikos I knew at Penguin Books and then at Thames
& Hudson (where, like him, I became an honorary member of
the Neurath family), and the Nikos I knew at Montagu Square,
where, with David Plante, I enjoyed, year after year, the
pleasures of gossip, food, and wit that for me recalled the
legendary salons of the early century, whether in Bloomsbury
or Gertrude Stein's Paris.
There was always a "Who's Who" of the art and literary world
coming in and out of their top floor flat - Stephen Spender,
David Hockney, John Golding, Linda Nochlin, David Sylvester.
Being up there was like being on Olympus. But it was also
like being in the most measured, unpretentiously elegant of
households, with David and Nikos quietly keeping even the
most raucous company under control.
Nikos's reach was transatlantic too, and we would eagerly
await his and David's visits to New York, where we would try
to match their hospitality and guest lists. For us, as for
the Neuraths, Nikos soon became a family member. Reasserting
his national origins, he always smiled over our children's
names, Sophie and Theo, referring to them as "the Greeks".
It was easy to think of him as "Uncle Nikos". He was the
kind of person you would as easily invite for dinner with
relations as with an élite group plucked from the New York
art scene.
Nikos Stangos presided over his own domestic world with such
grace and charm that it was often a surprise to learn that,
outside these confines, he had lived so many different,
seemingly contrary, lives. If it was hard to remember, from
the material comforts of his home, that, as a graduate
student at Harvard, he had passionately embraced the
abstractions of philosophy, it was even harder to realise
that, as a privileged youth in Athens, he had endangered his
life by becoming an active Communist. But this was also the
Nikos who was so in love with his two Wagnerian cats,
Siegfried and Sieglinde, that he would hesitate to travel.
Nicolas Stangos, editor, publisher and poet: born
Athens 21 November 1936; commissioning editor, Penguin Books
1967-74; commissioning editor, Thames & Hudson 1974-2003,
director 1981-2003; died London 16 April 2004.